boiling water or [with their] hands and feet burned … and then that twists in your head. I did very well serving over there. I made it back in one piece physically. I had a 100-percent save rate in both of my tours. I never lost a Coalition force. But the toll it took on me personally was more. PTSD
takes many different forms, and part of it is the things that you’ve seen — the jumpiness at loud noises. … A more debilitating form was I was obsessed that I was going to kill somebody. I became … terrified … I was going to make a mistake and [a servicemember] wasn’t going to get to go home to his family. I became very hypervigilant. [I] would review every-
thing over and over and over and would stay up at night. … And that carried over when I came back to my civilian job. … Some people might say it made me a better doctor when I came back because I continued to be that hypervigilant in my civilian job, but … I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. … It’s hard to describe to people in the civilian world
what it’s like over in Iraq and Afghanistan. … There was no understanding. If I was in the parking lot of the grocery store and a helicopter flew over … I would drop my groceries and look for the injured guy. … PTSD is … normal responses to abnormal situations. So I learned [in Iraq] that the sound of a helicopter meant some- body was dying if I didn’t get to that helicopter. … My reactions were still abnormal for being in the civilian world, hearing a loud noise and hitting the ground is abnormal when you’re at a fireworks display [but] not on a military base. If I’m at Fort Benning [Ga.], getting ready to deploy, and a car backfires, five out of the 50 of us might hit the ground, and everybody just goes, “Oh, when did you get back?” I reached out to Military OneSource. And the first
therapist who was kind enough to see me said, “I’ll help you all I can, but I’ve never treated anybody with PTSD. I’ve never treated anybody from war.”
So that didn’t go very well. I was still getting worse. So … Military OneSource sent me to somebody else, and that person said, “Oh, I’m going to help you as much as I can, but I’ve never treated anybody with PTSD.” … It seemed to just get worse, and I couldn’t seem to
get any help, and so about six months after I got back from my second tour in Iraq, I tried to kill myself. … When I woke up in that intensive care unit, I was very angry, very upset that that didn’t happen. I felt lost. I felt hopeless. I couldn’t get any better. I was an embar- rassment to myself. I was an embarrassment to my fam- ily. Now I was an embarrassment to the Army. That’s how I felt. [My] nurses called TRICARE, and they called the VA
apparently, and they told [my] story. They said … she’s going to be stable to go, but we need a place to send her. [They said] “We have places to treat people with PTSD
now. … But she’s a female, right? Well, that’s going to be two-year wait list.” … [The wait for men was] six weeks. … So I was just in limbo, and my family actually
reached out and found a place that treated PTSD. It’s a private place. It’s not affiliated with any of the military, but they have a heart for treating people in the military, and I went there, and I spent nine months undergoing treatment there for my post-traumatic stress. ... They were able to help me and give me a life back. They gave me hope back. And I’ve been able to go around and talk to other soldiers and catch them before they got to where I did. And that’s been really great. I’ve been able to speak out in Coronado [Calif.] and at some other places where there are some military veterans who were at the end of their life ... and it’s not uncommon for somebody to call me on the phone and say, “Hey, I need you to call this guy. He’s in a hotel room. He’s got a gun, but he said he would take your phone call.”
Caring for Military Families
Guest speaker Sen. Elizabeth Dole introduced a new initiative, Caring for Military Fami- lies: The Elizabeth Dole Foundation. When her husband, Sen. Bob Dole, was treated at the then-Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth Dole saw firsthand the importance of supporting caregivers of injured servicemembers. The ini- tiative will fund research on the topic and bring together organizations that already are working to resolve issues involving injured servicemembers and their caretakers. “I believe America has not fulfilled her promise to care for our wounded and their caregivers who have sacri-
ficed so much,” Dole said during the event. “The Elizabeth Dole Foundation is committed to hope and healing for every single individual who has risked his or her life for our nation. … Let us take the problems you face into the opportunities you deserve. Only then will it be morning in America again for all of us.”
NOVEMBER 2012 MILITARY OFFICER 63
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